Report: How Did The Biden Administration Do On Solving “Climate Change”?

From the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

We are now in the last hours of the Biden Administration. Today the Bidenauts complete four full years in office. And as we all know, their number one priority from the day they took office was to address what they called the “climate crisis” (or sometimes, the “profound climate crisis”). Famously, after lavishly promising on the campaign trail to address and solve the crisis, newly-installed President Biden then issued multiple Executive Orders on the subject in his early days in office, most notably this one from January 27, 2021. He promised an “all of government” approach, with every department and agency explicitly tasked to make addressing the climate crisis central to their mission. In the following years, Biden proposed and then pushed through Congress legislation containing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of subsidies and tax benefits for so-called “renewable energy,” said to be the solution to the climate crisis through replacing carbon-emitting fossil fuels with clean and green wind and solar substitutes.

To remind you of the level of the promises that were made, consider the preamble of that January 2021 EO, which had the title “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad”:

The United States and the world face a profound climate crisis.  We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents.  Domestic action must go hand in hand with United States international leadership, aimed at significantly enhancing global action.  Together, we must listen to science and meet the moment.

With Biden now leaving office, this is an appropriate moment to take a look at exactly what “progress” has been made toward the promised reductions in emissions. The answer is, any emissions reductions have been so tiny as to be almost imperceptible.

In the big picture, whatever emission reduction have been achieved have mostly resulted from substitution of natural gas for coal in electricity generation. This substitution would likely have occurred by natural market processes without any of the government subsidies and credits for wind and solar power.

To help us in our review, the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) puts out monthly data on energy production and consumption in the U.S. These data have been updated through September 2024. The EIA data on “primary energy” can be found at this link, and the data on electricity generation and consumption at this link.

Primary Energy

The term “primary energy” refers to all energy used in the economy in all sectors — not just electricity, but also transportation (cars, trucks, trains, planes), industry, agriculture, buildings, and everything else. In other words, this is the full picture.

Go to Table 1.1 at the primary energy link for the “Primary Energy Overview.” Here we find that in 2020 — the last year of the prior Trump administration — the U.S. consumed a total of 88,872 Quadrillion Btus of primary energy, of which 73,169 QBtus from fossil fuels, 8,251 QBtus from nuclear, and 7,290 QBtus from “renewable energy.” (Note that the “renewable” category is not just wind and solar, but also includes things like biomass and geothermal.). Anyway, doing some simple division, that would make 82.3% from fossil fuels, 9.3% from nuclear, and 8.3% from renewables.

The last full year of data are for 2023. Total primary energy consumption was 93,691 QBtus, of which 77,271 QBtus came from fossil fuels, 8,099 QBtus from nuclear, and 8,256 from renewables. The percentages are then 82.5% from fossil fuels, 8.6% from nuclear, and 8.8% from renewables. (Percentages may not add up to exactly 100% due to rounding.). The percent from fossil fuels actually increased slightly from 2020.

Only nine months of data are available for 2024, but those show little change in relative shares: 70,345 QBtus total primary energy consumption, of which 57,662 from fossil fuels, 6,168 QBtus from nuclear, and 6,478 QBtus from renewables. Thus 82.0% from fossil fuels, 8.8% from nuclear, and 9.2% from renewables.

With all the endless hype about the climate crisis and the hundreds of billions of dollars of federal largesse going into forcing an “energy transition,” would you ever have believed that these numbers would have moved so negligibly?

Electricity generation

The data on electricity generation by source are found in Table 7.2a at the electricity data link above. This time the data are not so helpfully grouped as in the last table, so some addition is necessary to get useful categories for our purposes. Fossil fuels are broken down into coal, oil, natural gas, and “other fossil fuels.” “Renewables” include not just solar and wind, but also “hydro,” and “wood, waste, and geothermal” (WWG), which are larger categories than you might think.

For 2020, the total generation is 4,009 terawatt hours, of which the fossil fuel categories add to 2,429 TWh, nuclear is 790 TWh, and the renewables total the remaining 790 TWh. But of the renewables, wind is 338 TWh, solar is 89 TWh, hydro is 280 TWh (net of some losses on pumped storage), and the remaining WWG renewables come to 70 TWh. So the percentages are 60.6% fossil fuels, 19.7% nuclear, 7.0% hydro, 1.7% WWG, 8.4% wind, and 2.2% solar.

Fast forward to 2023, and we find 4,183 TWh of total generation, of which 2509 TWh came from fossil fuels, 774 TWh from nuclear, 239 from hydro, 64 TWh from WWG, 166 TWh from solar, and 421 from wind. So now the percentages are 60.0% fossil fuels, 18.5% nuclear, 5.7% hydro, 10.0% from wind, 4.0% from solar, 1.5% from WWG.

Again, could you have imagined that the needle could possibly have moved so insignificantly? With all the vast subsidies and investments thrown at wind and solar, their percentage of the mix has just gone from 10.6% to 14% in three years, while fossil fuels have gone down from 60.6% to 60.0%, less than a 1% change.

For the first nine months of 2024, fossil fuels generated 59.5% of electricity, while wind generated 10.1% and solar generated 5.2%. Despite the billions upon billions of taxpayer subsidies, they creep upwards at an almost imperceptible pace.

Emissions

And has all the money lavished on buildout of wind and solar generators had any noticeable impact on carbon emissions? The two EIA pages linked above don’t have information on emissions, but here is another page with some useful information on that subject, titled “U.S. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 2023.” Excerpt:

CO2 emissions from the electric power sector declined by 7% (115 MMmt) in 2023, making up 85% of net energy-related CO2 emissions reductions observed over the year. The reduction was due to both a slight decrease in electricity demand, which fell by around 1% in 2023, and a significant decrease in coal-fired electricity generation caused by reduced coal-fired generating capacity prompted by competition with other generation sources. Electric power generation from coal fell by 19%, or 155 terawatthours (TWh), in 2023. Most of this generation was displaced by natural gas which increased by 7% (113 TWh) and by solar which increased by 14% (21 TWh). Because coal-fired generation emits more CO2 per kilowatthour than natural gas when combusted, replacing coal-fired with natural gas-fired generation reduces CO2 emissions overall.

Thus by far most of the retired coal generation was replaced by natural gas, and a small percentage by solar.

In summary, in four years the Biden administration made almost no progress in reducing “emissions,” other than a small amount of reductions that came from substituting natural gas for coal in the production of electricity. That substitution came about through market forces (i.e., low natural gas prices) and was not even the subject of the vast energy transition subsidies made available by the government. Although renewables made some small inroads in electricity production, the increase in their share in primary energy production over the four Biden years was barely noticeable (less than 1%).

The attempt to transition our energy system via command from central planners has been one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer funds ever perpetrated by the government. It cannot be ended soon enough.